Rehabilitation Center, IOM Mission to Moldova
Valentina Seuta,
Chief Social Assistant

The Chisinau Center for Rehabilitation and Reintegration provides assistance to adults, underage and children. „Mother and Child Friendly Wing” renders special assistance to trafficked persons and would-be victims. The program for liberation, reintegration, and protection of trafficked persons is designed to protect fundamental rights of children and their parents, as well as of persons exposed to the risk of trafficking.

Challenges

The following challenges have been identified, when assisting cases of trafficked children:

• Behavior problems associated with relations between victim and environment (both family, and friends, neighbors);
• lack of personal welfare;
• lack of self-confidence;
• extremes of assessment (under-assessment, over-assessment);
• lack of private life experience, perception, inadequate memorization and interpretation of own life experience;
• fear of stigmatization;
• lack of living habits;
• marginalization;
• mental deficiency;
• gaps in schooling and professional training;
• difficulties with complete reintegration.

Solutions

The identified challenges formed the basis for improvement of the work of the Center for Rehabilitation, for enlargement of the scope of services and assistance. In this context, the following solutions are opportune:

• Development of an intervention plan, which presupposes identification of objectives, tasks, and services, selection of means of intervention, determination of timeframes and responsibilities, whereas implementation of the plan presupposes fulfillment of tasks, objectives, and measures that lead to rehabilitation and social reintegration of trafficked persons, as well as to reduction or elimination of the risks of being trafficked;
• Case management ensures success in fulfillment of the intervention plan, if there is good communication between beneficiary and case manager, case manager and work group, communication on the basis of clear systems of registration and reporting.

If a child needs assistance that is beyond competence of the Center for Rehabilitation, the case manager refers the child to other existing services. In such situations it is necessary to:

• create multidisciplinary teams of professionals as to solve beneficiary’s problems;
• offer two forms of social assistance to the under-aged: direct treatment (mental therapy), directly targeted to individual beneficiary, offering the latter psychological support and developing his/her capacity to understand oneself, as premises for re-building the capacity for normal social functioning, and indirect treatment (social therapy), pivoted on beneficiary’s relational system and environment (influencing on the family and professional circle, group of friends or neighbors, general living conditions, etc.).

Methodologies

The method of psychosocial intervention uses psychological and sociological tools as to help beneficiary solve personal challenges and challenges related to social functioning.

When intensely working with a trafficked child, the latter is offered personalized psychological assistance, which includes five stages:

1. Stage of acquaintance can be “triggered” by social assistant, who identifies a person in trouble, or who can get a request from such person seeking assistance. This is a stage of mutual acquaintance, deeply marked by emotional elements; the basis for confidential relationship is built during this stage.

2. Stage of psychosocial examination deals with finding out those elements in beneficiary’s life, which are necessary for the social assistant to be able to help the beneficiary: family, material, and housing situation; professional activity and school background; bio-psychosocial factors (health, experienced feelings, attitudes, aspirations, played roles, group affiliation, etc.); significant elements of individual story; fundamental and secondary inter-personal relations; pressure factors and possible causes thereof; previous problems and manner of solving thereof; beneficiary’s resources and limits (constraints); identification of actual challenge and evaluation thereof.

3. Stage of psychosocial diagnostics or stage of evaluation of beneficiary’s situation. Psychosocial diagnostics is a double evaluation process: evaluation of individual’s personality and his/her social environment, evaluation of the problem faced by child and the realistic projection of means to be used for solving the problem.

4. Stage of development of intervention plan for purpose of reintegration – definition of objectives, means of fulfillment, and stages of execution.

5. Stage of plan implementation, or psychosocial intervention as such.

Group therapy has turned out to be efficient in the work with children, particularly with children, who display tendency towards silence and isolation. The group’s role is to determine them to share their experience, sentiments, fears, and hopes.

Objectives of group intervention include the following: victim’s security, exchange of opinions in connection with own victimization, sense of shame, responsibility, lack of hope and isolation; provision of information together with community-based agencies and with the aid of resources available in the community; exchange of experiences and experienced feelings; exploration of options and alternatives; encouragement of beneficiary to make decisions.

Group meetings last for at least 24 weeks and are particularly targeted to define sexual exploitation of the youth, children; the meetings include elaboration of security plans for women/children, analysis of sexual exploitation’s impact over children, socialization and nature of sexual exploitation.

In the framework of therapy meetings there have also been created support groups, which represent a method of intervention pivoted on a person’s social dimension. In a support group, a child comes across an outside point of view of the situation, by which he/she is overwhelmed, and this point of view is much easier to accept, because it comes from persons who went through similar experience.

Educational programs are designed to cultivate norms, values, habits, attitudes, knowledge, which can make it easier for a child to adapt to the reality and justify the capacity to solve the problems.

Educational models are especially used as part of correctional programs (duration - 6–7 months), and include:

• cognitive models of learning to recognize sequence of events and sentiments/feelings, which precedes sexual exploitation;
• use of own monitoring and own evaluation for reinforcement of what was learnt in the group;
• use of pretend plays as to exercise new behavior patterns.

Recommendations

Methods used in psychosocial rehabilitation can be various enough. Yet, the method of psychosocial intervention has proved to be the most effective. Along with the above-mentioned successes in the work with trafficked children, there have been identified some gaps, but analysis of such allowed us to draw the following recommendations:

• During children’s stay at the Center for Rehabilitation and Reintegration considerable successes are obtained in psychosocial assistance, whereas when children return home, they do not get support from local governments, and this leads to children’s continuous state of vulnerability.

We recommend that more NGOs should get involved in psychosocial assistance, and that government programs for support of trafficked and would-be trafficked children should be developed.

• Under-age trafficked children need a complex assistance, which can be ensured by cooperation and coordinated actions of team members and governmental and non-governmental structures.
• The period of provision of assistance to children should be extended for at least two years, ensuring monitoring of the case and progress record.